Sari Arho Havrén
My latest @RUSI_org commentary: China's 'war by other means' is there to see - if Europe looks past isolated incidents. Western planning has long been organised around one dramatic contingency regarding Taiwan: invasion. But Beijing has found something more economical. Below the threshold of explicit war, it is altering strategic realities ship by ship, licence by licence, narrative by narrative, integrating hashtag#greyzone coercion and hashtag#geoeconomic leverage into a single strategy. Each act is deniable; the cumulative effect is what a war is fought to achieve. The policy task: stop measuring the China challenge against the yardstick of invasion, and start measuring it against cumulative coercion: resilience, matching grey zone with grey zone, and faster collective responses. The absence of a declared conflict is not the absence of conflict. This applies to other domains too, such as China's support for Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. Stop measuring individual actions and start measuring support holistically. 1/2